Gaijin Entertainment

History

Gaijin Entertainment was founded in Russia in 2002 by Anton and Kirill Yudintsev, whose first big project was the PC racing game Adrenaline. After the successful launch of War Thunder in 2012, an office in Germany was established, to manage global operations and marketing. The company moved their distribution business from Moscow to Budapest around 2015, and their development headquarters followed shortly after. According to Hungarian tax records, Gaijin had 42 employees in Hungary by January 2022 and 56 employees by January 2023.

Presently, all Gaijin online games are operated from Germany, Cyprus and Hungary, while the development is scattered across Europe. The company now has six offices in total: in Karlsruhe (Germany), Larnaca (Cyprus), Budapest (Hungary), Riga (Latvia), Dubai (UAE) and Yerevan (Armenia). The company has around 200 employees split between those offices, with 60 of them based at the Hungarian HQ.

Gaijin Entertainment group generated 2.6% of all Hungarian software industry profit in 2020.

While Gaijin have produced a few single-player games in the 2000s, the company is now focused on free-to-play online titles. According to László Perneky, Gaijin's lead programmer, "Those who can decide on projects at the company mostly like to play multiplayer games".

Origin of company name

Gaijin Entertainment name comes from the Japanese word for foreigner. According to Anton Yudintsev, he was dreaming to enter the Japanese market one day while staying true to their roots as a European company and accept their position of an outsider there. Gaijin actually entered the Japanese market with the release of anime-style action game X-Blades in 2009.

Gaijin's logo features a snail that is a reference to Issa Kobayashi's haiku, translated by R.H. Blyth as:

O snail

Climb Mount Fuji

Controversies

The company gained notoriety for pursuing legal action against the owner of gaijin.com, an unaffiliated website that predates the company by seven years. The complaint expired and was automatically withdrawn in November 2013.

On 21 June 2020, adult actress Eva Elfie was sponsored by Gaijin's War Thunder, which sparked light controversy within the community. On 23 September 2022, an official Eva Elfie decal has been added to War Thunder, further strengthening relations between Gaijin and the porn actress.

In January 2021, after the logos of War Thunder and Crossout were seen in a video by Donbas YouTube channel "High Caliber Mayhem", Gaijin was accused of indirectly financing pro-Russian separatists in the war in Donbas. High Caliber Mayhem has denied any links to the separatist armed forces and published an explanation claiming that all the money from all advertisements on that channel were spent on humanitarian aid for civilians. The video showing the War Thunder advertisement was removed from High Caliber Mayhem's YouTube channel.

In response to the controversy, Gaijin stated "We do not provide political support to anyone anywhere. We know nothing about politics and prefer to stay out of it. Our agency that ordered an ad in the video in question took it down when they realized they might drag us into a political discussion."

Following an in-game economic change on 16 May 2023, a large amount of War Thunder players began revolting against the developers by review bombing the game on multiple platforms, such as Steam and Google. Since the changes have been announced, there have been over 65,000 negative reviews on Steam, dropping the overall rating from "Mostly Positive" to "Mixed" and the recent rating from "Mostly Positive" to "Overwhelmingly Negative", as of 22 May. In response, Gaijin has since reverted the planned economic change on 18 May, posted statements regarding the issue and player progression on 19 May, discouraging players from participating in review bombing, announced a revision of the economy for mid-summer 2023 and issued an apology. Gaijin also removed Steam from the supported platforms on War Thunder's official website. Steam hid the reviews posted after 19 May and marked them off-topic as the update in question was no longer a part of the game starting from that date. Some players launched a subreddit called War Thunder Player Union and started campaigning for 2 weeks of "strike action" starting on Friday 26 May 2023 and ending Thursday 8 June 2023. War Thunder Player Union had 14,900 members as of 26 May.